Travel Diaries of a Web 2.0 Newbie

Why didn’t someone tell me about RSS before! It has dramatically reduced the amount of time I used to waste because I had to surf through to different sections of different papers or journals in order to have a look for any interesting articles. Now, they all come to my reader and I can have a look at them altogether in a fraction of the time. I’ll admit that I don’t like to let the amount of articles build up too much, so I tend to check the reader once a day. But even when I haven’t been able to, it’s still not too daunting a task to just skip through all the summaries. I’ve found that it works better for me to check interesting links there and then, rather than starring them and just delaying everything. I can be a terrible procrastinator.

I found searching for good blogs difficult and time-consuming: the style of some people’s writing didn’t “fit” with me, and some were too philosophical – I’m looking for practicalities or people who seem to be looking at the same issues that bother me. It was also difficult to pick a blog based on just one or two posts – I suspect choosing blogs will be an ongoing, trial-and-error process.

I ended up searching for Biology or Science blogs as I want to know how relevant web-based technologies can be to my subject and students, and to get an idea of issues others are facing.

However, using the reader, I came across an article from the Education section of the Telegraph newspaper, and it reminded me of a post on a blog that I’d looked at as part of Thing 4. The Telegraph article was about a new “super-school” in the UK, that is currently being built, and how it will be scrapping homework and replacing it with an extra lesson and after-school activities. The new principal states,

”[Homework] is often set simply because there is an expectation it should be set. It does not help with education at all.”

The blog post was entitled, ”Why I Don’t Assign Homework.” and the two things together made me think more about my (and the school’s) rationale about issuing homework.

I completely agree with the blog post that

”The issue for most math teachers, I believe, is one of time management.”

I can’t speak for the maths teachers at our school (who are a fine bunch of people), but I know that I have been guilty of dumping work that we have not covered in class onto students as their homework. And I have also felt guilty imagining the homework I have given them multiplied up by however many other subjects they are taking.

This year I have been giving less homework and trying to make it more targeted to specific topics that students tend to find more difficult. The reason I wouldn’t scrap homework just yet (but just imagine – no more marking homework either!) is that we don’t have enough time, with our timetable and the length of our school year, to cover every topic in the way or to the depth I would like. So homework is often the only way that I can gauge how well a student has understood a concept, or the only way I can get any assessment of their understanding, given the time constraints of our lessons.

Of course, the flaw in my thinking is the assumption that the students have been keeping up with the material covered during lessons and that they have given the homework their full time and attention. This way I see what are the strengths and weaknesses in their understanding and/or expression. If it’s just a five-minute copying of their friend’s work during break, then it’s wasting all of our time.